

Hi Everyone! It's Amy Heller here today with a fun, home decor project for this November/Thanksgiving month here in the USA. And the final project was actually a happy mistake - more on that in a bit. I'm calling it my "30 Days of Thanks & Giving Door Hanger". The idea is something of an advent calendar and cornucopia in one - each day, everyone in your family writes something that they are thankful for, or something that they did that was "giving" to someone else. On Thanksgiving Day, you open all the little envelopes to reveal a plethora of thankful wishes and good giving deeds to warm your hearts and homes. My daughter has already embraced this tradition eagerly and has started depositing slips of paper into our festive door hanger.
Today, I'm going to walk through the most laborious part of this wall cone, the woven covering. I'm a fanatical lover of taking patterned paper and creating textural uses out of it. Something like a fiber artist, I love creating new ways for paper to move, gain strength, provide flexibility, and deepen it's innate beauty by weaving it.
Here's what you'll need:

Crate Paper, Farmhouse & Random Patterned Papers (cut into 1/2" wide strips x 12" long)
Crate Paper Buttons
Crate Paper Baker's Twine
Paper Mache Cone
Burlap
Twine
Needle
Sewing Machine (optional)
Wide Ribbon
First thing we're going to do is start arranging our strips. I used 11 different papers, but you can use as many or as few as you like. I also created a chaotic pattern with my strips - by arranging my strips in a somewhat disorganized fashion, but then making certain to keep the same order throughout my piece.

Once I'd arranged my "chaotic order" to my pieces, I began setting up my weaving template.

To make things a little more manageable with so many strips, I grouped the strips into sections, then taping the very ends together, making sure that the sides butted up to one another, but did not overlap. They should lay perfectly flush to one another. I taped both ends of each section, top and bottom.

Then, I took the sections, and taped those together.

This is what it'll look like.

Then, to make everything very sturdy, prior to working in the weaving, I stitched the ends right across the tape at the very ends. This will hold everything in place for when you weave. Now, using an over/under, threading, begin weaving your strips in between your secured strips. Then, use an under/over weave for the next strip, and so on, making certain to "tighten" each strip as you go.

Once you are completed, sew or tape along the opposing edges from the first ones to keep your piece secure. Trim off the excess. Once you've done that, your piece will look like this. It's now very flexible, even more so than before it was cut into. I love that!
Now, this is the part of the project, where my original plan went awry and I needed to come up with an alternate plan. At this point, you can easily use a craft glue to wrap your cone and make the woven paper seam the back of your cone. However, I had cut my cone open to get an accurate template for my original plan, and cut my woven piece too soon, leaving unfinished edges, so I needed to come up with a new plan for my lil' cone. So, here's what I did:

I measured up my open cone against my woven piece (inverted), and decided to sew it directly onto the perimeter of my cone.

I cut off the excess, and without glue, my woven piece was adhered to the cone, perfectly. Now here was my dilemma, I tried several different courses of action to then re-attach the cone in it's original conical form, including shoe-lacing the seams, which worked, but my edges were definitely unfinished, and threatened to fray. So, I started thinking, "What if I was able to both finish the edges by covering them, and creating a back to close up my cone with something?" That something turned out to be some scrap burlap I had. I used my sewing machine to attach two pieces of burlap to each of the two seams on the back of my paper mache cone. Once that was settled, I used another strip to cover the rough edges along the top of my cone opening.



To secure the back, I used my Crate Paper Baker's Twine to shoelace the back of the burlap together.

The last portion was to secure the bottom of the cone. I did that by using my button twine and simply slip stitching the bottom of each piece of the burlap, then tying the ends into a knot, which can be loosened for larger contents if necessary. I kept the length of my button twine long so that I could then lace up some Crate Paper Buttons to hang from the bottom of my cone.

Next up, I made a bit of a card for the front of my cone.


And that about does it! Definitely a new tradition that will take place in our home this year, and years to come! I hope you've enjoyed Crate's DIY feature today! I'll be back next month with another fun project! Have a wonderful day!
